Like a Magnet
by curi
Summary: Jayne reflects on his relationship with the woman he loves. Jayne/River. Oneshot. Last Edited 08/12


It's simple, why he loves her. He don't spend time pondering on it, of course—he's never been one for navel-gazing—but he _does_ feel it. And it's not because she's better than he deserves or because she makes him want to be a better man. He thinks these things, of course, because that's what lovers do; and they have their truths, but they're not _the_ truth.

He knows about good girls and bad boys. Before—before he became the man he is—he had his share of them; they were scrubbed clean and so innocently teasing, and they wanted him. They might have been using him to live a fantasy—might have been looking to scratch that itch with the danger they'd have to sneak in through the window rather than the front door proper, or he might have been using them to feel the smooth and the safety of a body unacquainted with the dark.

And it had always been sweet for a time—the rough against the fine, the knowing against the naive—but he knew he weren't playing for keeps. The good girls liked a bad boy to turn them on, make them hot, set them off, and show them a world outside of the rules they knew (make them think there were no rules at all). But after the good girls, the pretty girls, the girls with pigtails and braids and blue eyes and power, after they'd got what they'd come seeking (the tumblingtummynervousnauseous darklashessexyshadowsandohgo dslammingohyesdarkdarkDARK), they'd find they missed the light. The dark—bad boy's dark, _his_ dark—it fit them wrong.

They'd want to change him. They'd want him to _want_ to change for them. And he couldn't, wouldn't, didn't want to, didn't have to, didn't. It had happened more than once, because a soft, clean, willing girl's body (and her moans), that's something rare in the dark. In the dark, there are only women, with hard edges and teeth and flashing eyes that look at a bad boy in the dark and see him full; women with all that feline prowling.

A dark woman knows that a bad man ain't always hiding a hurt little boy inside. Sometimes peeling back layers shows a dark, hard man. And he hates men who hit women, weak men with weak solutions, but he finds he hates the women, too. Why do they refuse to see the evidence? These men, they might be worth saving, might be worth changing—he can't say for true—but he knows a good girl ain't enough to change a bad boy. It's a law of the 'verse, like gravity or inertia; he's sure of it.

This ain't something he thinks, because he ain't a thinking man. He runs on instinct, adrenaline, inertia, pure survival_nevergonnaletyoukillme_selfishness. So when it comes down to it, he don't really care about the why. He knows things in his belly, low on his hips, in his thighs and his calves. But he knows _she_ thinks on it, and he knows the others do, too. And he wants to have his own answers.

So this is what he knows: she's graceful, beautiful, young and clean, soft in ways he'll never understand. To look at her just once, it's a good girl plain as day; maybe a good girl gone crazy, but a good girl underneath. That's what he saw first, that's what they all want to see and keep digging to unbury.

It's a lie—a gorgeous deception.

For a man shot through with dark—dark in his veins, pulsing, pushing, hardening—it don't take more than a minute's study (careful, _honest_ study) to find the dark in her. Without the looking, he'd still have felt the pull—midnight to black velvet, kohl to burnt sugar (_caramel_, he thinks, _and I go to the trouble like a magnet_), dried blood to her hair, a dark woman calling to a bad boy.

She looks on him full, and the backs of her eyes reflect the dark she sees. She ain't asked him to change, won't ask him to become something soft and clean (_warm towels from the laundry, a puppy never kicked_). She don't ask him to change because she understands the way he does. She is a bad boy, too, and she's tired of all the prodding. They poke at her and peel back her layers, and she screams from the torture of always being reborn.

There is less to pick at now, and she's no closer to showing them the good girl they miss. Even if there weren't the love, the empathy would glow from his skin. A fellow dark creature, an equal, suffering; he thinks he would have reached out to comfort her without love.

But there is love, for the dark woman he don't have to dig to find. Layer after layer gone and still she flies true. It is good that he is her mate (_partner_, _lover_, _equal_, friend). He don't need what she can't give—does not want what she cannot be.

He knows this, too—can feel it in the scar across his chest, in the bruises and the scratches and the bite marks and the stings: dark to dark is not easy. Dark on dark snags, cuts, screeches and tears. He don't _want_ the pain, exactly—don't find himself excited by it—but it comforts him. It's a comfort to know that she hurts him back, that she can and she will and she does. Dark to dark ain't peace; it's honesty.

It's knowing this that keeps him steady after she lashes out and breaks his nose (_again_), or he grips her wrists in bruises and yells hard enough that, in a cartoon, his breath would make her hair blow out behind her. It keeps him steady while the others look at him angry, their eyes (_rarely their mouths; they're afraid of his fists_) accusing him of abusing their helpless _good girl_. It keeps him steady when they look at her with fear, make her cry against his chest.

He don't know if he misses life as one, without a match, identical, a mirror-image twin. He don't notice other females much, unless they get too close to her (_or she sees them get too close to him_). He has a home, sustenance, a mate, a life where he's useful, and where no one looks for softness in a bad boy.

And when he's soft with her, she don't mind; and his body knows this is love.


End file.
